Today Sony announced the BWU-200S, upgraded internal Blu-ray burner for PC’s with the ability to write a full Blu-ray disc in just 45 minutes. As with most media, I’m sure in the near future we’ll look back and scoff at having waited 45 minutes to burn a single disc, but for now this really isn’t too bad. We’re talking 50GB of data or 4 hours of high-def video in well under an hour, which is half the time it took Sony’s previous Blu-ray burner.

The same burner can also record standard DVD-R’s at 16x or a CD-R at 40x letting you have one drive to do it all. It rail-mounts inside your PC and connects via a Serial ATA interface compatible with Windows Vista/XP/2000. The BWU-200S comes packaged with CyberLink BD software letting users start burning movies straight from a camcorder. Sony says their new Blu-ray burner will start shipping in November with a price tag of $599.99, available now for pre-order.

Sony Internal Blu-ray Disc Rewritable Drive